In the latter part of the twentieth century we could argue that two indigenous visions dominate: in Scottish cinema that of Bill Douglas, in English cinema that of Terence Davies. That is to say, they dominate in terms of vision, not in terms of output. Both careers were haunted by failure to realise key projects. Douglas had devoted much of his time to a screen version of James Hogg's classic Scottish novel The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, for which there exists an extant screenplay but little more; Davies has tried for many years to bankroll a version of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song – two great Scottish artworks but neither in the end brought to the big screen. Uncannily, Douglas shared a desire to bring Hogg's classic to the screen with Ingmar Bergman, but in the end Bergman decided it was unfilmable. Douglas, with hand-to-mouth funding courtesy of the British Film Institute and then Channel 4, never had the luxury of making such a decision. What links Davies and Douglas in the UK films they did make is, loosely speaking, fictionalised autobiography – Davies in Liverpool, Douglas in Newcraighall, just outside Edinburgh. But these films are something much more: memory-films that forge a virtual history out of their own lives, fragments of a life that are remade and reworked, first through the medium of memory and then the medium of film itself.